snark: a (well-deserved) attitude of mocking irreverence and sarcasm

August 17, 2019

"It shouldn't be this difficult." That's what runs through my mind, too often, when it comes to getting public records from the City of Salem.

(Oregon variety; maybe the Massachusetts Salem can conjure up a spell and get records to requestors more easily, given their witch heritage.)

Here's a chronology of my current frustration:

July 29, 2019. Request submitted. I fill out a Public Records Request form, scan it, and email it to the City Recorder's office, which oversees requests. I ask for:

All documents, emails, and other communications relating to the use of the Capital Press building owned by the Salem Alliance Church as a temporary public library by the City of Salem.

August 1, 2019. Cost estimate provided and paid. I get an email from a legal assistant in the City of Salem Legal Department. Rather confusingly, these two items are checked under "In response to your public records request:"

-- The City is the custodian of (maintains) the requested record(s). (IT Dept, City Manager's Office, Urban Development Dept.)-- The City is uncertain whether it maintains the requested record(s). (CD Library)

I'm perplexed by the "uncertain" statement. What the heck is a CD Library?

We're not talking about ancient history here. The controversial selection of the church-owned building to house a temporary library (because the Salem Alliance Church denies LGBTQ rights) happened this spring and summer. So how could these records not be maintained by the City of Salem?

I'm given a cost estimate of $476.80 to get the records.

Only six hours of staff time are required, plus $10 for a CD. However, two hours are for someone making $89.90 an hour, two hours are for someone making $96.80 an hour, and two hours ae for someone making $46.70 an hour.

Annualizing that hourly wage (40 hours/week times 52 weeks/year), I find that my humble request is being handled by staff costing $186,992, $201,344, and $97,136 a year. Heading to Amazon, I also find that a bundle of 100 recordable CDs can be had for $17, or seventeen cents a CD, with free shipping. So $10 for a CD seems outrageous. As does the hourly staff time costs.

Nonetheless, I drive to the City Recorder's office that same day and pay the amount requested. Why? Choose one or more reasons, all valid: (1) I'm crazy. (2) I'm obsessed with the temporary library issue. (3) I care deeply about LGBTQ rights. (4) I believe in government transparency.

August 16, 2019. Things have changed. Yesterday I saw that I'd gotten an email about my public records request. Since two weeks had passed since I'd forked over the $476.80, at first I thought that the records were being sent to me. But no, the email said something else.

Mr. Hines:

I wanted to let you know that due to the voluminous amount of records associated with your request and the staff time that it will take to review the records, I estimate the records will not be available for release until August 30, 2019, and perhaps even later . To give you some idea of the magnitude of the request, the initial email sweep contained a whopping 2,700+ emails! Right now, we’re in the process of narrowing the scope of the search as much as we can, to reduce the amount of non-responsive records that were captured in the initial email sweep, since we must review each email one-by-one to ensure they’re responsive to the request.

Please note, there may be additional costs for the review time, but we’ll send you an estimate if or when one becomes available.

Thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,

Amy JohnsonDeputy City RecorderCity of Salem

Before I comment on Johnson's message, I want to say that I've found the City Recorder's Office to be, by and large, efficient and responsive to my public records requests. The problems exist elsewhere in the City of Salem bureaucracy, I'm quite confident. That said...

How is it possible that 2,700+ emails are associated with the selection of the Capital Press building owned by the Salem Alliance Church as a temporary library location? Not knowing how it would be possible, naturally now I'm more curious than ever to learn what those emails say.

Which is what I'm going to tell Johnson when I reply to her message: please don't leave out any emails relating to the subject of my public records request. Yet I'm also going to tell her that I don't consider I should have to pay for staff time involved in sorting through irrelevant email messages.

Look, I'm not a highly organized person. But I do get dozens of emails a day, some of them important. For example, for the past few months I've been working on getting a book I wrote ready to be sold on Amazon. (Click here to see the Break Free of Dogma Amazon listing.)

I save the messages from the book designer and Amazon/Kindle Direct Publishing staff in a special folder. Ditto for documents related to the book project. If someone wanted to see all the documents related to my book, it'd be easy for me to find the emails and documents.

So I don't understand why the City of Salem has such difficulty locating communications related to my public records request. It sure seems like City staff should be required to keep all emails and documents concerning a project in specific folders -- mostly digital, but in paper form also when there is no electronic copy.

It seems very strange that someone has to review every one of 2,700+ email messages in order to comply with my public records request. Again, I want all of the relevant communications, and I don't want to have to pay the City of Salem to find communications related to my request that should have been properly organized from the outset.

Also, a public records request shouldn't take a month or more to fulfill, as Johnson says is likely.

Nor should it cost markedly more than the original cost estimate. It sure seems like the City of Salem staff responsible for selecting the Capital Press building for a temporary library would have a very good idea of how many emails and other documents were involved in this effort.

I'm going to ask for a fee waiver, given that my public records request is very much in the public interest, given how controversial it was to choose the church-owned building for a temporary library.

At the very least, I don't believe I should be charged any more than the original cost estimate, especially since it now appears that it is going to take a month or more for the City of Salem to fulfill my public records request.

July 16, 2019

I get it. It's summer. The living is mostly easy. There's so many causes -- political, social, cultural -- that demand your attention. But please give some serious thought to spending a few minutes to help some people close to home: Salem's LGBTQ communities.

Here's the issue they need your help with.

The Salem Public Library has to be relocated while renovations are made to the library building at the Civic Center. City officials favor using the old Capital Press building adjacent to the Broadway Commons as a temporary library.

Problem is, the Capital Press building is owned by the Salem Alliance Church, as is the Broadway Commons. The church isn't LGBTQ friendly.

Now, if you're either already familiar with this issue, or don't need further convincing to support the LGBTQ communities in Salem who oppose leasing of the church-owned property for a temporary public library, I urge you to do one or more of these things as soon as possible -- since the City Council will be discussing this issue, and likely acting on it, at the Monday, July 22 council meeting.

(2) Submit advance testimony for the July 22 City Council meeting to [email protected] with a "cc" to [email protected] Include your full name and address. Express support for the Human Rights Commission position that a different location than the church-owned building should be found for a temporary library, even if that location is more costly and less efficient in terms of operations. Note that alternative locations have been identified by City staff.

(3) Testify in person during the three-minute public comment period at the Monday, July 22 City Council meeting, 6 pm at the council chambers in City Hall (555 Liberty St. SE). Sign up before the meeting, indicating which agenda item you’re testifying on. Read your testimony if desired, but often testimony has more of an impact if it's spoken while looking at the council members and comes from the heart, as well as the head.

OK, with this important citizen activism request out of the way, we return to the subject of this blog post: why Salem's LGBTQ communities need the help described in 1-3 above.

I also shared a letter to the editor in the Statesman Journal calling for a boycott. So it wasn't surprising that the Salem Human Rights Commission voted unanimously to reject the plan to use the church-owned building for a temporary library, even if an alternative location costs more and is less efficient in terms of operations.

And that vote occurred after City officials met with both the LGBTQ Rights Task Force of the Human Rights Commission, and the Commission itself. Thus the decision to oppose using the Capital Press building during the library's relocation period (18 months or so) was well-informed, given that those officials hoped to convince the Human Rights Commission to support use of the church-owned building.

"The Salem Human Rights Commission (Commission) is deeply concerned about the proposed lease of the property owned by the Salem Alliance Church for the temporary location of the Salem Public Library.

The Commission values having a library that they can reasonably expect all persons will access, to be consistent with the purpose and intent of the City's Human Rights Code. The Commission believes that some members of the community, including some in LGBTQ communities, will not be comfortable accessing the space.

…The Commission respectfully requests that the City review the available properties for other potential options, and select another location, even if that location is not as ideal in cost or operations."

There are indeed other properties available to serve as a temporary library. I'm confident of this because I've listened to audio recordings of several meetings of the Library Renovation Subcommittee of the City Council, including the most recent meeting in June.

Daniel Rollings, president of the Salem chapter of PFLAG, a national organization that advocates for LGBTQ rights, said the plan is still tantamount to partnering with a hate group.

“I am completely opposed to the city partnering with any organization, regardless of what it is, that actively discriminates against anyone,” he said. “The city should not put out bids to work with the (Ku Klux Klan) nor should they work with anti-LGBTQ organizations that actively discriminate against the LGBTQ community.”

If you find what Rollings said to be unduly provocative, here's how I see the situation.

Imagine an alternative reality. Most people are gay, attracted to the same sex. But there's a minority who are heterosexual. One of the largest churches in Salem wants to lease a building to the City of Salem for a temporary library. It's well known that the church will only marry LGBTQ individuals. And it considers sex between people of the opposite sex to be a sin.

If you're heterosexual, wanting to marry a woman if you're a man, or a man if you're a woman, would you feel comfortable using a library in a building owned by a church that denies your right to marry? And not only that. Whether you're married or not, the church says that you shouldn't be having sex with someone of the opposite gender, because that would be a sin.

How would you feel about taxpayer money being used to lease space in a building that opposes what you consider to be fundamental human rights: the right to marry whoever you love, and the right to have sexual relations with someone of the opposite sex?

Speaking as a heterosexual man, I wouldn't like that at all.

Which is why I'm supporting the Human Rights Commission, because I understand why members of Salem's LGBTQ communities don't want the City of Salem to lease space from a church that denies their basic human rights.

July 12, 2019

Please sign this petition I just started to support the Salem Human Rights Commission in its stand against the City of Salem leasing a building from the Salem Alliance Church to temporarily house the public library.

The church rejects same-sex marriage and considers same-sex sex to be a sin. The Commission is calling on City officials to find another location for the library while renovations are made, even if that location costs more and is less convenient.

July 10, 2019

I'm a proud atheist. But for 35 years I was religious, having been an active member of an Indian organization led by a guru considered to be God in human form.

So I understand how powerful religious faith can be. I also know that secular forms of faith are equally powerful and deserve just as much respect.

In fact, more so, as I'll explain below.

This is why I admire the stand of Salem's Human Rights Commission, which recently unanimously voted to oppose the City of Salem paying the Salem Alliance Church for use of a church-owned building to temporarily house the public library while renovations are being made.

Not surprisingly, the Salem Alliance Church doesn't base this anti-LGBTQ attitude on anything but the Bible. Which is a circular argument, since as I noted in a post on my churchless blog, the church uses the same illogic that is common to every religion.

What we believe is true because the holy scripture or holy person we believe in says it is true.

But here's the important thing. Religious faith has nothing to do with the practice of being faithful to some cause, moral standard, or divine entity. Martin Hägglund discusses this in his marvelous book, "This Life: Secular Life and Spiritual Freedom."

Religious faith takes the object of faith to be a god -- or some other form of infinite being -- that is independent of our practice of faith. Our spiritual cause is treated as though it were a being that commands and has power over us without being dependent on us.

In other words, the Biblical God worshipped by the Salem Alliance Church isn't affected in any way by how LGBTQ people are treated. That God (which I consider to be imaginary, along with all other gods) isn't lessened or enhanced if same-sex marriage is legal, as it is in the entire United States now.

Secular faith is committed to persons and projects that may be lost: to make them live on for the future. Far from being resigned to death, a secular faith seeks to postpone death and improve the conditions of life. As we will see, living on should not be conflated with eternity.

The commitment to living on does not express an aspiration to live forever but to live longer and to live better, not to overcome death but to extend the duration and improve the quality of a form of life.

...To have secular faith is to acknowledge that the object of our faith is dependent on the practice of faith. I call it secular faith, since the object of devotion does not exist independently of those who believe in its importance and who keep it alive through their fidelity.

The Salem Human Rights Commission was practicing secular faith when it issued the statement calling for the City of Salem to find another location for a temporary library, even if it cost more or was less convenient than the church-owned building, because, as the Commission said in its statesment:

It is offensive to some members of the Salem community for the City to enter into a contract with, and pay money to, an entity that may be experienced as unwelcoming to members of the LGBTQ community.

...Locating the Library at the proposed site will result in a Library that some members of the community, not only the LGBTQ, will not be willing to visit, and will negatively impact the Library’s mission.

Hopefully city officials and the Salem City Council will realize that people take secular forms of faith just as seriously as religious forms of faith.

I say this because when I listened to an audio recording of the April meeting of the City Council's Library Renovation Subcommittee, I was struck by how much of the tenor of the discussion over where to temporarily house the library centered around cost and convenience, not the ethics of using public funds to pay a church that, to put it bluntly, views LGBTQ people as second-class citizens.

Earth to City officials: It isn't always about money!

The Human Rights Commission has said that even if it costs more to lease a different building, this should be done, because it is the right thing to do.

That's secular faith -- having the courage to stand up for a cause, and at-risk people, even when this is inconvenient, bothersome, and expensive in monetary terms. After all, what's the point of saving money if a value that makes life worth living is frittered away?

I'll end with another quote from Martin Hägglund's book.

The commitment to mutual social freedom as an end in itself -- as a spiritual cause that commands us to act -- is our secular achievement and not due to any religious revelation.

Freedom as an end in itself is not promoted by any of the world's religions or by any of its founding figures. Neither Jesus nor Buddha or Muhammad has anything to say about freedom as an end in itself. This is not an accident but consistent with their teachings.

What ultimately matters from a religious perspective is not freedom, but salvation; what ultimately matters is not to lead a life but to be saved from being alive.

February 12, 2019

After I watched the Salem City Council kill the Salem River Crossing or Third Bridge project last night, my first reaction was to feel deeply thankful toward the six councilors who did the right thing by saving Salem from this Billion Dollar Boondoggle.

But with a bit more reflection, my thankfulness expanded to include many hundreds, in fact many thousands, of people who stopped the Third Bridge.

Most broadly -- and in some ways most importantly -- everybody who worked so hard to elect the six progressive councilors on the nine-member City Council. The Third Bridge would have continued on with no serious roadblocks if the Council had remained dominated by conservatives and a lonely progressive, Tom Andersen.

Thus arguably the unsung heroes in this saga of people-power triumphing over money-power are the people who donated money, knocked on doors, and otherwise helped with the campaigns of Tom Andersen, Cara Kaser, Sally Cook, Matt Ausec, Chris Hoy, and Jackie Leung. Progressive Salem greatly aided these campaigns, with the notable exception of Leung's.

Salem owes all of you a big debt of gratitude, along with the voters who cast their ballots for these six progressives. This debt can't be quantified, even though a billion dollars is a defensible nice round number.

Next, a big shout-out to those who appealed the City of Salem's go-ahead for an expansion of the Urban Growth Boundary to accommodate a Salem River Crossing bridgehead. When the Land Use Board of Appeals ruled in favor of the appellants on several "assignments of error," it was clear that the project was doomed.

Why?

Because the legal remand back to the City Council to address the errors meant that the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the Third Bridge would be on hold until the Council acted to fix the problems. Last night, the Council voted not to do this, which killed the project (since a deadline for completing the DEIS was coming up).

So massive thanks go to those who petitioned LUBA: Sarah Deumling, Linda Wallmark, Gary Wallmark, Linda Bierly, Ken Bierly, James (Jim) Scheppke, Robert Cortright, and Doug Parrow. E.M. Easterly joined in as an Intervenor-Petitioner. John Gear served as their able attorney.

I'll add that last night Councilor Jim Lewis, an avid Third Bridge supporter, posed a ridiculous question to Cortright after Cortright testified against moving the project forward. Lewis asked why the LUBA petitioners didn't appeal the decision, since they prevailed on only a few rather minor points.

The eight citizen petitioners who brought the appeal are very pleased with the remand. They urge that Salem pursue a number of less-costly actions to address traffic congestion problems rather than try to repeat the UGB expansion process to accommodate the new bridge on the new route.

In other words, once Third Bridge supporters were a minority on the City Council, there was no way the UGB expansion was going to happen.

No UGB expansion meant no final Environmental Impact Statement. No EIS meant no Third Bridge. Thus Cortright simply told Lewis that he was pleased the Council was revisiting the legal issues, since he was confident the six progressive councilors wouldn't want to address the assignments of error.

I just said No 3rd Bridge folks, as in plural, but in large part the group's Facebook page and organizing efforts were led by one guy, Jim Scheppke. Yes, he had help.

Scott Bassett initiated the fight against the Third Bridge and deserves a lot of credit for his solid research on the drawbacks of this project. Scheppke then was instrumental in keeping the drawbacks of the Third Bridge in the public eye through frequent Facebook posts over a number of years and other means.

The citizen members of the initial Salem River Crossing Task Force helped out by voting for a "no build" option, as this showed that while bureaucrats and special interest groups favored the Third Bridge, the general public and Salem neighborhood associations were opposed.

Surely there are other people who were instrumental in stopping the Third Bridge who I haven't mentioned. Accept my thanks in abstentia.

Lastly, I want to thank those who helped kill the Third Bridge by their clumsy support of it.

This includes several Salem mayors, most recently Chuck Bennett. Heavy-handed politicking with rampant fact-free spin-doctoring by public officials and the Chamber of Commerce helped sway people against the project, as did a failure to reach out to opponents and seek common ground.

The green-shirted Salem Bridge Solutions group didn't advance its cause by spreading similar blatant falsehoods, along with a notorious display of bad behavior at a West Salem Neighborhood Association meeting. With friends like that, it's no wonder the Third Bridge has died a well-deserved death.

June 02, 2018

I'm a fan of strangeness. But there's pleasing kinds of strange and disturbing kinds of strange.

Watching yesterday's special City Council meeting about Salem's toxic algae water crisis via a Facebook feed gave me the latter sorts of feelings...disturbing.

Here's five things that struck me as strange:

(1) That the meeting needed to happen at all. The City Council just had a meeting on Tuesday. But City of Salem officials botched their response to dangerous levels of toxic algae cyanotoxins in the water supply so badly, a special meeting on Friday was necessary.

This wasn't exactly the biggest emergency Salem might face.

It pales in comparison to, say, the next Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, a massive blizzard exacerbated by global climate change, or a zombie apocalypse (least likely, hopefully). So if City staff can't handle something fairly small, it doesn't make me confident they can handle something big.

(2) The City Council was kept in the dark by City officials. City councilors expressed a lot of entirely justified righteous indignation at the fact that City Manager Steve Powers and Public Works Director Peter Fernandez didn't contact them after elevated levels of cyanotoxins were detected on Friday, May 25 (from a sample taken on May 23).

Instead, the councilors learned about a health advisory alert on Tuesday afternoon, May 29, shortly before the alert went out to the general public. City staff met on Friday, May 25, then continued to consult Oregon Health Authority staff, EPA staff, and maybe others through the weekend and up until last Tuesday.

But no City staff thought it would be a good idea to consult the elected officials, Mayor and eight city councilors, who represent the people of Salem. This is a big deal. It shows that the City Manager and Public Works Director believed they're the ones in charge, and there was no need to communicate with elected officials about the toxic algae crisis.

I think it's time for some heads to roll at City Hall (just figuratively, so please don't send me plans for guillotines if you agree),

(3) City officials were fine with not notifying the public about high cyanotoxin levels. Public Works Director Fernandez and other City of Salem staff seemed actually proud that they notified the public on May 29 that a water sample taken on May 23, plus subsequent samples, showed toxin levels warranting a health advisory for vulnerable populations, because even though people were exposed to the cyanotoxins for a week, this was less than a "10-day window" when no ill effects supposedly will occur.

Here's a screenshot of the elevated testing results:

Well, there's some problems with this cavalier attitude.

Seven days is 70% of the way to the end of the 10-day window. People have widely varying responses to toxins. There is much that isn't known about the nasty stuff in toxic algae. Oregon Health Authority staff acknowledged that there aren't hard and fast rules about when to issue a health advisory, and this was left up to City of Salem officials to decide when, or whether, an advisory should be issued.

So City Manager Powers and Public Works Director Fernandez gambled with the health of children under six, kidney dialysis patients, pregnant women, people with compromised immune systems, and other vulnerable populations by allowing these people to drink tap water for seven days after a sample was taken that showed a dangerous level of a cyanotoxin.

By contrast, I watched KGW news last night, which had a story about toxic algae in the Wilsonville water system. Wilsonville notified the public after a single positive test result, and shared the numeric result, which was shown by KGW.

(I recall the result was .34, and the health advisory standard is .3)

This shows that cities committed to openness and transparency are capable of communicating with the public about toxic algae test results in a timely manner.

Unfortunately, Salem isn't one of those cities. Public Works Director Fernandez and City Manager Powers need to be held accountable for putting vulnerable populations and pets at risk.

(4) Pets didn't get the love from City officials that they deserved. Speaking of pets, the water advisory that finally was issued on the afternoon of May 29 said that pets shouldn't drink tap water. But for a week, Salem pets were ingesting water with cyanotoxins.

Many pets are much smaller than children under six, which are considered part of the vulnerable population that was the target of the health advisory. Some Googling showed that a typical Yorkie dog weighs between 3-7 pounds, a cat between 8-10 pounds. Pets are at high risk from drinking cyanotoxins in their water bowls.

My wife volunteers at the Willamette Humane Society. They use well water, fortunately, and have made that water available to pet owners. It's unconscionable that City officials allowed pets and other animals in Salem (think bird baths) to ingest water for a week that contained cyanotoxins.

(5) Numeric test results weren't shared with the public or City Council. Lastly, yesterday (Friday) was the first time citizens or city councilors were able to see the water quality test results that resulted in the health advisory being belatedly issued.

That's ridiculous.

As noted above, Wilsonville released test results after a single test showed an elevated level of toxic algae in the city's water supply. But even after the City of Salem issued a health advisory, no numeric test results were released to the public. Several days ago I asked the City's communications manager, Kenny Larson, for these results, but never got a response.

The public deserved to know what the level of cyanotoxins were that led to the health advisory. It turns out that on several days the level was high enough for a general "adult" health advisory, but apparently one wasn't issued because levels dropped in later water samples.

It was totally unacceptable for Salem's City Manager and Public Works Director to withhold the numeric water quality test results from citizens for an entire week. This reflects a general lack of transparency and openness at City Hall, something I'm well aware of from the many public records requests I've had to make.

Today's Statesman Journal has a story about the Wilsonville toxic algae test result. It says:

"We're being abundantly cautious here, and providing information that allows our community members to make an informed decision," said Wilsonville city manager Bryan Cosgrove.

Salem needs to borrow Cosgrove so he can teach Salem's city officials about how to communicate with the public. They did a horrible job this time around.

May 28, 2018

The Statesman Journal is doing a poor job of reporting on local news here in Salem. But what's the alternative? Well, an opinion piece in The Guardian is about how people in East Lansing, Michigan formed a local paper, East Lansing Info.

About a decade ago, my historic neighborhood was facing the possibility of a giant commercial development being built just down the hill from us by a company known to have a troubled history. Worried about our way of life, the president of my neighborhood association and I started going to city council meetings.

Watching our city government came as something of a shock. While the policies were consistently liberal – in favor of the arts, the environment, and the unions – the behaviors were troubling. We saw cronyism, unmanaged conflicts of interest, and a general attitude that citizens are at best naive bores.

...So I did something I never thought I’d do. I used my skills as a professional historian and mainstream writer to become a local investigative reporter. Then, in 2014, I assembled a board and created a foundation to bring in donations from our community to provide news, hiring regular citizens and teaching them how to be local reporters. That neighborhood president I teamed up with a decade ago? Today, Ann Nichols is the managing editor of our organization, East Lansing Info. We’ve had 110 citizens report for us so far.

I really like this idea.

The East Lansing Info is a non-profit organization run by a board of directors. The paper is free to read online. Some reporters choose to be paid; others write stories for free. Donations and voluntary subscriptions support what I assume are paid staff: editors and technical people who keep the web site running. The paper's People page gives more details.

I've thought about this notion before. It struck me that one hangup with making it happen was the complexity of fashioning the software needed to keep a local news web site up and running.

The East Lansing Info uses Drupal software, whatever the heck that is. More comprehensible to me is the software used by the Institute for Nonprofit News, an organization I learned about by scrolling to the bottom of the East Lansing Info home page and noting that the paper is a member of it.

I can envision Salem Weekly, our town's alternative paper, morphing into a local news nonprofit along the lines of the East Lansing Info. I like what the Michigan paper is doing, aside from their decision to avoid editorializing.

In an effort to promote community news sharing and to focus especially on East Lansing, ELi confines itself to local news and information (you won't find any editorializing at ELi!) and encourages audience members to consider participating in ELi as editors and reporters. We think of ourselves as a "news cooperative" because we encourage all of our readers to consider contributing news and information.

Since I'm an avid reader of newspaper opinion pages, I'd want to see editorializing be a part of an independent Salem online paper. I also enjoy TIME magazine, which does a good job of "news analysis," mixing in blunt facts with educated interpretations of what those facts mean.

Ann is a diehard progressive, like me. Yet we both have become fierce advocates of non-partisan news. That’s because, watching our city council, Ann and I could see the same thing: when people get elected to serve in government, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, independent or Green, they tend to be human, not heroic. Liberals, like conservatives, assume they will govern differently once in power. They will drain the swamps, represent the little people, spend public money only in just and reasonable ways! What really happens?

Here's what she says happens, all of which I've noted to some degree happening here in Salem with the City Council and City of Salem staff.

Pattern No 1: elected officials believe in ethics until someone they like breaks the rules. We had one member of council who repeatedly advocated for her business from her council chair. That’s not only unethical, it’s illegal. She also took thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from developers and landlords and voted on their financial business without disclosing those payments before the votes, as required by a law that very council had passed. But did anyone on council hold her to the rules? Nope. We had to report on it. (She was voted out of office.)

Pattern No 2: elected officials also honestly believe, when they run for office, that they will finally bring transparency to government. But once in, they quickly discover that they’d rather not tell the people everything. Doing so – particularly when controversial decisions haven’t yet been hammered out – just complicates their lives.

Just about every week, we must use the Freedom of Information Act (Foia) to get documents that should be readily available. I recently had to make a formal Foia request to obtain a copy of a handout our city manager gave to city council. This was his draft of the city’s “strategic priorities” for the coming year. On the list of his strategic priorities: open and transparent government.

Pattern No 3: government accountability? Here again, Democrats are as Republicans. As soon as the oath of office is administered, they seem to become incapable of admitting mistakes, especially those of their own party. As we face a $200m debt (mostly pensions) in a city with only 20,000 year-round residents, our council has taken up the mantra: “Now is not the time to worry about blame; now is the time for solutions.” Me, I happen to think a little blame helps prevent more mistakes.

Pattern No 4: And then there’s the cronyism problem. True graft is relatively rare; I’ve not seen it in my city. But what we see every day is how people in power take care of the people to whom they feel some loyalty. This is where it feels impossible to bust in as an average citizen and have any meaningful say in the decisions being made. Those decisions – which in our town can involve a tax deal worth $50m arranged by the mayor for friends – are being made at tables to which we are not invited.

When Ann and I look at our city council, our state legislature, and Congress, what we see are not dramas of good and evil. What we see is the tragedy of human nature. American government is full of a lot of well-intended people making a lot of self-serving decisions. It’s no different with liberals or conservatives.

March 19, 2018

Today I had an stimulating conversation about Salem, including political goings-on, with a person who had some appealingly fresh ideas about what needs to change in our city to make it a better place to live for everybody -- not just the already well-off.

Our talk got me to thinking about what Salem would be like if... where what follows the "if" is an outcome unconstrained by what exists today, because that would pretty much guarantee more of the same.

Here's a sampling of what my mind came up with.

What if Salem...

-- Had a City Council that truly reflected the diversity of our population, which would notably include at least one Latino councilor, and ideally several. Plus, four or five women on the nine-member Council, not just two, as is the case now.

-- Was a town where you could easily get anywhere in the city limits at almost any time without a car, because mass transit and safe bike paths had become a priority over hugely expensive street "improvements" that didn't merit that name.

-- Had a Chamber of Commerce that acted as a moderating force between divisive political views, rather than a group that always tilted toward the conservative end of the spectrum.

-- Benefitted from a daily newspaper that covered local issues in a zealous in-depth fashion, keeping people informed about happenings in Salem they needed to know about, along with investigative reporting that wasn't afraid to criticize the rich and powerful in this town.

-- Was a place where minorities got the same respect from the Powers That Be as the white men who have run Salem for, well, forever, and continue to do so today.

-- Had leaders at the City of Salem (City Manager, Department heads) who regularly engaged in no-holds-barred Q & A and discussion sessions with members of the public who could ask them tough questions and expect answers with zero bureaucratic bullshit attached.

-- Never had a governmental committee, task force, work group, or such, that didn't include several members who had direct personal experience with the problem being studied (unlike, say, the current Downtown Homelessness Solutions Task Force which, I'm pretty sure, doesn't have any members who are actually homeless).

-- Had a full-time, well-paid, Truth & Transparency Ombudsperson employed by the City of Salem whose sole job was to ensure that both verbal and written communications by City staff were clear, accurate, and written in language that anyone could understand.

-- Was an outpost for PolitiFact, or a similar fact-checking group, that kept local politicians and other civic leaders on their truth-telling toes, because otherwise they'd be held to account for the lies/falsehoods they told.

-- Had an ongoing outreach program to people in Salem who are marginalized, don't have much of a voice, and feel estranged from local government that gives them a regular "soapbox" at City Council meetings where they get to talk about their unresolved problems and get straight answers about why nothing is being done about them.

-- Became known as the Oregon town with the most innovative, creative approaches to civic problems.

Hi Brian. Honest questions: What concrete things have you done to make Salem better? How many people do you currently employ and how many have you employed over the past ten years? How much cumulative tax have you paid over the past ten years? Have you built anything?

I think it's great that people speak out on a blog and try to add value. However, if that is all that you do, you are just typing. You have no real world experience creating or building. If a small community in the middle of nowhere was just made of 50 people like you, it would whither and die in less than a generation.

Ben left the second comment.

I’d love to see Brian put up his list of volunteer contributions towards making Salem a better place, so that could be compared with TJ Sullivan’s. But of course, that won’t happen, because sitting in your underwear behind a computer screen and blogging about your urinary tract problems and geriatric skateboarding while generally complaining about those you disagree with really pales in comparison to the countless hours TJ Sullivan has given to this community.

Ooh! Fighting words. Let's get it on.

To begin with, Concerned Citizen is way off base with the assumption that only people with employees are doing "concrete things to make Salem better" and have "real world experience creating or building."

I come from a family of highly successful businesspeople. I'm not stating this because it makes me look better. I'm stating it because it is a fact that informs my current worldview.

My great-uncle and godfather was Conrad Hilton, the hotel person. I spent quite a bit of time with him as a youth, since my (divorced) mother lived in central California and he lived in the Beverly Hills area. My maternal grandfather started a materials handling company. My father was a co-founder of a high-tech company in the 1980s.

Being the oldest male child on my mother's side (I never met my father until I was in my 30s, and then only for an hour), it was assumed that I'd go to Dartmouth, get an MBA from the Tuck Business School, and eventually run the family materials handling/electric lift truck business.

But I shockingly decided to go to San Jose State College, where I majored in Psychology, then got a Masters in Social Work from Portland State University (where I also became a Ph.D. dropout in Systems Science). My mother, an intellectual, loved that at San Jose State I was admitted to an honor's program featuring tutorials with a small number of students and professors.

So screw the idea that the only good life is one devoted to running a business. This denigrates most of the United States population.

Further, I never heard any of my family members talk as if being a businessperson was more important than any other calling. I can't remember any of them putting other people down because they weren't running a business. So this is a new thing for me, the idea that someone's life is worthless if they don't have employees.

As you'll read below, I've done a lot of creating and building. It just hasn't been structures, or a company.

Regarding Ben's comment about me blogging in my underwear, this has never happened. (But for the right amount of money, I'm ready to both do it and publish photos of me in the act.)

What has occurred is a tremendous amount of volunteer time I've given to my blogs since 2003. Hey, Ben and Concerned Citizen, since you admire a business mentality so much, here's some hard data about my blogging for you to chew over.

Total pageviews: 7,843,580Total posts: 5,383Total comments: 44,662

The market, as the saying goes, has spoken.

Not one of the almost 8 million pageviews was coerced. Not one of the almost 45,000 comments was forced upon the commenter. Lots of people have been reading the blogs that I created and built because they find value in what I write about, even if they don't agree with what I have to say.

Now I'll turn to what I've contributed to Salem.

I moved here in 1977. At first I worked for the State Health Planning and Development Agency as an executive service manager. Then I became the publicist, and after that, executive director, of Oregon Health Decisions, a pioneering nonprofit bioethics organization.

I'm proud of what was created and built during that part of my life.

The work we did in conjunction with then Senate president John Kitzhaber laid the conceptual framework for the Oregon Health Plan/Medicaid expansion. We engaged the public in discussions about death with dignity and living wills.

Turning to my neighborhood, I moved out of the Salem city limits to rural south Salem in 1990. Almost immediately I began serving on what amounts to our "neighborhood association" in our planned community, Spring Lake Estates. For about 24 years I was the secretary for our neighborhood group and put in countless volunteer hours in this position.

My wife and I led our neighborhood's fight against a subdivision that threatened our water supplies. For about five years I tirelessly worked on this battle. We eventually succeeded, showing that when a community sticks together, it can overcome great odds.

What about Salem proper? Well, here's a list of things that I feel good about accomplishing after I became an ardent Salem citizen activist about four years ago.

-- I wrote a tell-all report about the shameful destruction of the U.S. Bank trees on downtown's State Street. This, I believe, gave impetus to revisions that were made to Salem's tree ordinance so more large, beautiful, healthy trees wouldn't be needlessly cut down.

-- When the parking lot at Riverfront Park next to the Carousel was threatened by a planned road for apartments on the west side of the railroad tracks, I and others worked hard to prevent this from happening. I discovered that it would take years to get federal approval to allow the changes to Riverfront Park, which helped kill this bad idea. The apartments ended up being built along Commercial Street, a marked improvement.

-- I led the fight agains the poorly thought-out $82 million police facility bond measure that was defeated by Salem voters in 2016. The price tag was reduced to $61 million in a second-try 2017 bond measure, saving Salem's citizens about $21 million.

-- For several years I, along with others, harped on the need to seismically retrofit the Library and City Hall along with building an earthquake-safe police facility. I'm convinced that if we hadn't worked so hard to bring this to the attention of the City Council, and the citizenry in general, there wouldn't be a bond measure on the November 2017 ballot to make seismic upgrades to the Library, along with other renovations.

-- I wrote a Strange Up Salem column for Salem Weekly at no charge or about two years. This undoubtedly brought joy, delight, and inspiration to countless Salemians. (Well, it did for me, at least.)

-- I've been a member of the Salem Community Vision steering committee since this group was founded. We've done a lot of good things, and will continue to do more.

Lastly -- the reader can only hope -- I was an active member of an India-based spiritual/meditation organization for about 35 years. I volunteered to write three books for the organization, which took an immense amount of time and energy.

For many years, too many to remember, I was the secretary for the local spiritual group in Salem, which held weekly meetings that I had to arrange, set up the chairs for, and often give the talk ("satsang") at. Yeah, I know, to some people this doesn't count as volunteering because I'm not a Christian. In fact, I'm now an atheist. But this volunteer work was a labor of love of mine for a long time.

(If you aren't totally bored with this rendition of my life, there's more on my web page that's devoted to me.)

Anyway, I've responded at length to Concerned Citizen and Ben because (1) it bugs me when someone asserts that I haven't created or built anything because I'm not a businessperson, and (2) it bugs me even more that this assertion oozes over into denigrating the contributions of everybody in Salem who has taken a non-business path in life.

Concerned Citizen said that if everybody was like me, a community would wither and die. Well, the same is true if everybody was like anybody.

Salem would die if there were only businesspeople in it. And not just figuratively, literally, since there would be no doctors and no nurses. And if there weren't teachers, librarians, artists, musicians, philosophers, writers, and so on, Salem wouldn't be a town worth living in.

So let's bury the Chamber of Commerce notion that Business Rules way more than ten feet under. How about ten miles under. I and countless others are valuable members of the Salem community not in spite of us not being in business, but because we're not.

September 19, 2017

T0night the City of Salem asked people to express their top priorities for actions in the Strategic Plan that's under development.

I took these photos in the Broadway Commons meeting room at about 7:15, more than halfway through the 6-8 pm Strategic Plan Open House. The crowd was pretty thin at that point -- probably as many city staff and officials were in the room as concerned citizens.

So the top priorities might have shifted a bit over the next 45 minutes. But by the time I left, the #1 priority action was a Climate Action Plan.

(Every person who came to the Strategic Plan Open House got seven green dots and one yellowish orange dot to put on various actions associated with seven goals.)

A Climate Action Plan coming out on top is great news, since while President Trump is a global warming denier, everybody who understands the science knows that climate change is happening, humans are responsible for it, and we need to act now to reduce carbon emissions.

Or, to put it bluntly, we're screwed when it comes to our one and only planet remaining habitable for humans.

A Climate Action Plan got 21 "Best Idea!" votes by the time I left. The runner-up action with 17 orange dots was this one:

The meaning of "Infrastructure Maintenance Prioritization" isn't crystal clear on the face of it, but this was the action that supporters of a Third Bridge mostly used to express their Build It Now mantra -- since there wasn't any action in the Strategic Plan goals calling for the Salem River Crossing, or Third Bridge, to be built.

Naturally I and others pushed back against this ridiculous notion. My post-it note is the one on the right.

Two other actions tied for 3rd place in my 7:15 pm Strategic Plan Voting Sweepstakes Awards with 7 votes each. Here they are:

"Sustainable Substantive Funding Stream for Affordable Housing" got quite a bit of well-deserved love from Open House attendees.

So did "Citywide Visioning Process for Growth and Development." Which, not surprisingly, got a Build the 3rd Bridge now! post-it note.

Here's the sad little action that got the smallest number of green dots, just one.

Urban Development Department Director Kristin Retherford was standing next to this sheet. I asked her if she was depressed by the fact that only one person wanted new urban renewal areas in Salem. She smiled and said "No."

I thought I saw a tiny sheen of a tear in her eye. But it could have been the lighting.